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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Twitter Story Competition

Yesterday I challenged my students to a twitter story competition. Twitter is a social medium that allows you to post status updates, market, send links to live news feeds, info fetching, etc. However, one only has 140 characters to get their message across or provide a link. A character is any letter, space, or punctuation. It's limiting, but teaches concise and clear language. Anyway, they have to tell a story (using all story elements) in 140 characters or less. The students don't' have to have a twitter account. They can email, blog, or write it on paper. However, they also have the option to tweet me with their submission.

Can you do it? Are any of you up for the challenge? I'm sure the kids would love it! If you would like to give it a go, you can type your story as a comment on the blog and I will share it anonymously or state the author's screen name with the kids.

Here is a student example:

I woke up with a headache so bad, I couldn't brush my teeth. When the worm burst out, the pain stopped. Death was salvation.

Funny how kids always write about death. Perhaps it's a way of trying to understand it.

I participate in a weekly microfiction prompt at www.stonyriver.ie It's more challenging than it sounds, similar to writing poetry because the words have to say exactly what is needed in an interesting way.

Like your 55. I actually write a blog every Sunday and I call it the 160 - the number of characters in a text message. Similar to the Twitter challenge you gave your students. I found it interesting that MS Word counts differently than a text. My 55 is HERE.